* The Master of Disaster is also at Whitehall, right near Downing Street. Apparently his American deputy, when he was supreme commander of the Allied Forces in South-East Asia said, “The Glamour Boy is just that. Enormous staff, endless walla-walla, but damned little fighting.”

The Royal Pavilion at Brighton – commissioned in 1787 by George IV when he was Prince of Wales as a pleasure palace and a concrete vision of an Orientalist’s wet dream too, perhaps – was transformed into a military hospital during the First World War for the wounded Indian soldiers. Between 1914 and 1916 more than 4,000 Indian soldiers were fighting under British command on the Western Front in France and Flanders and were treated at the Royal Pavilion. It was hoped that the Pavilion would make the wounded feel less home sick. One soldier wrote home to say it reminded him of paradise.

About

In Turkish, a seyahatname is book of travels; a travelogue. This space was set up largely as a distraction and refuge from the world of thesis and stress that I seemed to inhabit during the M.Phil. Now, its a just a nice way to chronicle my time in the beloved city.